Case Number 05606

MADTV: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON

The Charge

What, me worry?

Opening Statement

MAD TV debuted in the fall of 1995 as Fox's attempt to go head-to-head
with NBC's Saturday night juggernaut, Saturday Night Live. Fox hoped to
use the cachet granted by the show's connection with America's foremost
comic/satire magazine to grab a share of the late night comedy market.
Bankrolled by music legend Quincy Jones, the show was a traditionally-formatted
hour of sketch comedy, just like SNL, SCTV, The Kids in the
Hall, The Carol Burnett Show, and its other spiritual
predecessors.

Although the show never garnered enormous ratings, and never really matched
the ratings of SNL, it has proven surprisingly resilient. It's now
entering its tenth season, despite having had two complete cast turnovers in
that period. How has the show survived? Simple -- it somehow manages to be
consistently funny (a claim SNL can't make), and from time to time it's
outrageously funny. Warner Brothers has now begun the process of bringing this
show to DVD, starting, logically, with the first season.

Facts of the Case

MAD TV is, as described above, a pretty straightforward sketch comedy
show, taped in front of a live studio audience. Each 42-minute show contains
about ten vignettes of varying content. Unlike SNL, MAD TV
originally avoided recurring characters, instead focusing on short one-premise
sketches. That's not to say recurring characters were completely absent; in
fact, no fewer than three recurring bits were launched in this first season. The
shows are sprinkled with occasional musical guests or stand-up comedian acts as
well. Connections to MAD Magazine come through animated segments based on the
"Spy vs. Spy" cartoons and the works of artist Don Martin.

Early on, MAD TV established a reputation for producing spot-on
parodies of Hollywood films, beginning with the first show's "Gump
Fiction," a strange but hysterical blending of Pulp Fiction and
Forrest Gump. (Cast member Phil LaMarr had appeared in the former as the
hapless Marvin, who meets his messy end in the back seat of Jules's
convertible.) Animator Corky Quackenbush also provided stunningly executed
"claymation" films that parodied the look of the Clokey cartoons
(Gumby, Davey and Goliath) and the Rankin-Bass holiday specials
(Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, et cetera), to great comedic effect.

The cast from this first season is one of the more talented bunches of
actors ever thrown together into a comedy show. None of them were well-known
prior to the show's debut, but several have gone on to bigger and better things.
Most people now know Orlando Jones as "The 7-Up Guy," thanks to his
long series of commercials for the soda, but he's also had several film roles.
David Herman and Phil LaMarr don't appear in front of the camera very often, but
they're among the most in-demand voice actors currently working. (If you're a
Futurama fan, you've heard both of them. A lot.) Mary Scheer has also
done some voice work, and produced the TV show Most Extreme Elimination
Challenge. Artie Lang is a regular on Howard Stern's radio show, and
appeared on Norm MacDonald's sitcom The Norm Show. Bryan Callen starred
on Inside Schwartz, and can currently be seen on Fat Actress. The
adorable Nicole Sullivan did a good deal of voice work for Family Guy
(which co-starred former MAD TV cast member Alex Borstein), and
eventually landed a full-time role on The King of Queens. Only two of
this initial cast (Sullivan and long-timer Debra Wilson, who didn't leave until
2003) lasted beyond the end of the third season, with most leaving after season
two. But for those two years, this was a striking accumulation of talent.

The Evidence

I remember watching MAD TV when it first premiered back in 1995. I
liked it -- but I didn't like it enough to stop watching Saturday Night
Live. (I do remember that I thought Nicole Sullivan was really,
really cute -- but I'm shallow as a kiddie pool, so go figure.) It was a real
pleasure to rediscover this show on DVD nearly a decade later. It's a
surprisingly funny show that is exceptionally well-written, and it clearly
deserves a place in the sketch comedy pantheon.

MAD TV's strength is in the general simplicity of its comic bits.
Most of the sketches on the show are "single-premise" concepts -- i.e.
there's only one funny thing going on in the sketch. Call it a "one-note
joke." Single premise concepts can be risky, because you're always in
danger of overextending that premise -- and when you do, things get very unfunny
very quickly. MAD TV solves this dilemma extremely well: they keep
everything short and sweet. Sketches rarely run longer than three minutes, which
is plenty of time to hammer home the comedy of the premise, but not enough time
to let things drift into the danger zone. It also makes the show pretty snappy
-- things move along quickly, and you never feel trapped inside a bad sketch.
(I'm looking at you again, SNL...)

There is an enormous amount of comedy in this DVD set -- nineteen
full episodes (roughly 13 hours of material), plus several bonus features,
including the full "200th episode" from the ninth season. Shockingly,
there are almost no clunkers among the sketches. Everything on-screen is no
worse than "moderately funny." That's a triumphant achievement for a
show like this. It would be pointless, not to mention insanely time-consuming,
to do an episode-by-episode rundown for this show, because it's so diverse in
its offerings. There's a music video from the Rolling Stones. There's a spoof of
James Bond films starring supermodel Claudia Schiffer. (She's actually pretty
good, believe it or not.) There's a performance by the band The Presidents of
the United States of America. There's Mary Scheer doing one of the best Barbra
Streisand impressions I've ever seen. There's a recurring bit with Sullivan and
Herman playing annoying Gen-X newscasters. There's a version of the Rankin-Bass
"Rudolph" special done in the style of Scorsese's Raging Bull.
There are recurring faux commercials for a dating service named "Lowered
Expectations" (their motto: settle for what you can get). And much, much,
much more.

Some of the humor is moderately raunchy, but no more so than SNL has
been recently. (Paging Col. Angus...) Since this was a network show, most
profanity is bleeped -- but it did air in a late-night slot, so only the worst
words are cut. It's probably not a show for sub-high-school aged kids. But they
probably wouldn't get a lot of the humor anyhow. (See the rebuttal section for
more details.)

Warner provides a good chunk of extras on the disc. About half an hour's
worth of filmed-but-unaired sketches are provided. Some of them are funny; with
others, it's clear why they were cut from the broadcast. There's also a solidly
funny 10-minute blooper reel. The second side of the final disc has the complete
200th Episode from 2003, which featured the return of several departed cast
members. (Including, interestingly, Artie Lang -- who had been fired in 1997 due
to his raging cocaine problem. He's cleaned up now.) Finally, several sketches
spanning the entire run of the show are included in a "best of"
section, organized based on what the sketch is spoofing. Some of these are
absolutely hysterical -- I strongly recommend the "edited for PAX-TV"
version of The Sopranos.

Picture and sound are about what you'd expect from a television series on
DVD. The Dolby 2.0 surround mix is a bit bass-heavy -- make sure you don't wake
up the neighbors by playing the Heavy D-composed theme song too loud.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

On the whole I have very few complaints about this set. But the viewer should
be warned: a lot of the humor in the show is very topical. If you don't
remember the big news stories from 1995-6, or if you don't remember the specific
commercials from that season that the show parodies, you might not find certain
things all that funny. (Although O.J. humor will never get old, right?)
That's why kids probably won't enjoy this set as much as their parents would.
But the topical humor only amounts to roughly a third of the total sketches at
most, so there's still a lot to enjoy here.

Closing Statement

MAD TV -- The Complete First Season is a very solid package for a very
entertaining show. Although MAD TV is often overlooked when discussions
of sketch comedy shows come up, it's not for lack of quality. Fans of
Saturday Night Live or SCTV should find a lot to enjoy here, and
the set should have good replay value.

The Verdict

Not guilty. And Nicole -- if you're still single, and would be interested in
dating a starving writer, by all means give me a call. You're SO my
type...